It’s one thing to make it in New York. It’s another thing to make it in the recording studio. If you can make it there, you really can make it anywhere — from a warehouse in Wichita to a theater geek’s basement in Denver.

A cast album is the equivalent of musical immortality. But it’s an expensive and risky proposition, one until recently reserved for only the most popular of Broadway hits.

The unlucky off-Broadway musical “The Last Five Years” played for only two months in a downtown New York theater that narrowly escaped destruction from the World Trade Center collapse.

When a show opens and closes that quickly, it’s usually never heard from again. But not only was “The Last Five Years” recorded, it helped launch a niche Internet label called Sh-K-Boom Records that has since preserved more than 40 cast recordings, including “Legally Blonde” and “Altar Boyz.” It earned four Grammy nominations in its first five years.

The cast recording is the primary reason “The Last Five Years” has gained enormous popularity in regional theaters in cities like Denver, where it has just begun a four-month run at the Galleria Theatre in the Denver Performing Arts Complex.

“It was a show we all felt so strongly about, that we knew it had to be recorded,” said Sherie Rene Scott, who starred in that doomed New York production in January 2002. ” ‘The Last Five Years’ never got the kind of life that it was building, but the cast album has given the show that life. It’s the perfect reason we started the label: Shows need to be preserved.”

Sh-K-Boom Records was launched just before 9/11 by Scott and husband Kurt Deutsch to record solo side projects for Broadway stars like Adam Pascal and Patti Lupone. But the quick life and death of “The Last Five Years” gave the label a new focus: cast recordings.

“I knew that the show was like a fine wine, and maybe not appreciated as much as it should have been when it first opened,” said Scott, who now plays Ursula in Broadway’s Denver-born “The Little Mermaid.” “We had incredible word of mouth, and audiences would weep openly. But a lot of reviewers didn’t get it at first . . . and the theater kicked us out because they thought a better thing was coming in — that ended up not being a better thing.”

What some didn’t get at first was the musical’s wholly original structure. This is the story of a fated love affair, but while it plays out from beginning to end from Jamie’s perspective, it is told from end to beginning from Cathy’s — so the two actors interact onstage only once, at the wedding in the middle. It asks audiences to emotionally invest in a relationship it knows is doomed from the start.

Scott starred in New York with Norbert Leo Butz. Denver audiences on any given night might see one of four combinations of rotating stars Shannan Steele, Chris Crouch, Johanna Brickey and Thom Miller.

“Some people are taken aback by the structure,” Scott said. “A lot of people want linear story lines, but this show challenges the audience to do a little work. I think it’s more of a challenge for them, but I think it’s so much more interesting this way. It’s not trying to manipulate you into falling in love with these people and then be destroyed when they themselves are destroyed.”

The appeal to some, and the challenge for others, is accepting this is a contemporary musical that will lead honestly from love to infidelity and divorce (and vice versa).

For those who expect a happy ending, Scott says: “That’s not part of this story.”

This is the story of how difficult it is for two creative people to be together. Jamie is a rising novelist, Cathy a struggling actress, and like the structure of the storytelling, their career arcs are not going along on parallel lines.

“Marriages don’t always last, and this is one of them,” Scott said. “The whole point here is that you are hearing each character talk about their marriage, and you only hear it from one side at a time, which is the way that you hear real people talking about their marriages anyway.”

“If people want to see a happy couple together, I don’t know, they should go watch ‘Bye Bye Birdie.’ ” Then, she added with a laugh, “I don’t know why I said that. That’s just what came to me.”

The show has been performed in Colorado before, with stagings by Modern Muse and Theatre Aspen by Broadway veterans such as Susan Dawn Carson, Paige Price and Hadley Fraser. But it’s the cast recording, Scott believes, that has allowed productions like the one in Denver now to launch with a built-in fan base.

“I wish people could listen to the cast recording before coming to see that show, because they can listen to things over and over and really come to understand the nuances of the writing and the acting.

“It really is a special show, and I am not kidding when I say that I get stopped by people every day who ask me to sign CDs. A lot of college kids are particularly influenced by this show. It’s amazing.”

Scott and Deutsch are Midwesterners who grew up without the Internet, so her only access to theater was reading plays, doing them — and cast albums. Now, in addition to cast recordings, their Sh-K-Boom Records has produced more than 50 live concerts and spawned a subsidiary, Ghostlight Records, dedicated to the preservation of traditional musical theater recordings. All available with a click.

“There is a whole community of theater geeks like myself out there that were made to feel like outcasts and misfits, and that there were very few of us,” she said. “But the Internet has made all of us theater geeks feel like we’re not such a small community.

“There are a lot of people out there like me who are drawn to this kind of music and are drawn to this kind of life — and I think that’s wonderful.”

Weekly podcast

Running Lines with … Onahoua Rodriguez This week, Denver Post theater critic John Moore talks with one of the stars of the Denver Center’s “Lydia” and the FX Network’s “The Shield.” Joining in are company members Geoff Kent and Leslie O’Carroll. Click here. You”ll be taken to a miniplayer. Once there, click its triangular “play” button, and the podcast will begin, with no downloading necessary.

KritiKaraoke: Hear an audio version of a recent review

This week: George and Martha, those bickering lovebirds from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” read from John Moore’s review of Theatre13’s “And Baby Makes Seven.” Click here. The link takes you to a miniplayer. There, click the triangular “play” button, and the feature will begin playing without your having to download.

Ben Platt, who more than three years ago spoke the words and sang the music of “Dear Evan Hansen” for the first time, going on to win the Tony Award in June for best actor in a musical, will leave the celebrated musical in the fall, the show’s producers announced Monday.